Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Cultural Shift and the FinOps Team

FinOps is more than a technology solution or a checklist handed off to a team. It’s a living, breathing way of maximizing the value of cloud. Technology certainly helps solve problems like monitoring optimization recommendations and detecting anomalous spending, but it can’t have a conversation about the business value of those actions.

In this chapter, we’ll look at who drives FinOps and where they tend to sit in an organization. We’ll examine FinOps personas and roles, because ultimately it’s people who make FinOps work.

Company culture around spend must evolve alongside tooling and processes in an organization. There are plenty of obstacles and challenges in implementing a successful FinOps practice. They’ll either be caused by or solved by people and teams. Ultimately, it comes down to you. Will your teams develop and adopt the right principles and practices for successful FinOps?

Deming on Business Transformation

While researching for the second edition of this book, we came across key principles for managing business transformation published in 1982 by renowned engineering and business professor W. Edwards Deming. Many of the key points of FinOps echo Deming’s principles, so it’s worth looking at a couple of Deming’s key principles.

Deming focused on constancy of purpose. His view was that the best way to drive a company to long-term success was to foster long-term thinking and be constantly implementing continuous improvement. ...